Preview: October 12, The Bach Society Presents a Special Mozart Requiem
The performance is dedicated to their late pianist, Sandra Geary
The Bach Society of St Louis programs a few “big” pieces of music each season, such as its namesake’s most famous masses, Handel’s oratorios including Messiah, and the major requiems by various classical composers. But this weekend at First Presbyterian Church of Kirkwood (3:00 pm Sunday 12 October), the selection accrues a particular gravity for The Bach Society, as they dedicate their season-opening performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D-Minor to their late pianist, Sandra Geary.
Geary, just 59, died suddenly on 23 June this year. One of the most accomplished collaborative pianists in St Louis, Geary arrived here from her native Ireland in the late 1980s. Atop several degrees she’d already amassed in Cork and London, she stacked a Bachelor’s from the Saint Louis Conservatory of Music. She taught there, at the St. Louis Symphony Music School, and eventually at Washington University, where she spent three decades. Though maintaining a special relationship with the Bach Society, she played with many classical organizations here, including all three opera companies on the Missouri side of The River.
Shortly after losing Geary, The Bach Society announced that their fall concert would be dedicated to her memory. Appropriately, this happened to be many classical music enthusiasts’ most beloved Requiem Mass, Mozart’s.
This genre enjoys a particular grace from the classical music gods. There really aren’t any mediocre ones in the standard repertory. Even people who don’t count Mozart and Brahms among their favorite composers concede their Requiems are among the greatest pieces of classical music ever composed. Verdi’s seems to transcend genre, in some ways a twenty-seventh opera, without staging, much as Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde both is and isn’t one of his symphonies. Berlioz, Faure and Duruflé gave us great Requiems as well. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber, often viewed a little dismissively by classical musicians, composed a Requiem that slaps. Composers up their game when commemorating the dead.
Of all these, Mozart’s occupies a privileged position. In 2002, when umpteen classical music organizations observed the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, they staged the “rolling Mozart requiem,” such that the work was being performed somewhere on earth continuously for 24 hours.
Bellyaching accompanies other works that composers didn’t live to complete; bitter debates surround what to do with Puccini’s Turandot, or Mahler’s Tenth. But hardly anyone dares question the viability or greatness of Mozart’s Requiem, despite Franz Xaver Süssmayr’s completing the sections following from the Sanctus. (About twenty other completions exist). Just as everyone in Saint Louis classical music loved Sandra Geary, everybody loves the Mozart Requiem.
Mozart’s Mozart, but the Requiem presents a lot of differ looks. The early sections, the “Kyrie” and the “Dies Irae,” recall the heavy metal D-minor overture and the antihero’s induction to Hell from Don Giovanni. They both anticipate the almost Herzogian ‘God against all’ of Verdi’s terrifying “Dies Irae.” Other moments, such as the “Rex Tremendae,” recall Bach’s contrapuntal richness. And you probably don’t have to be told about the magic of the “Lachyrmosa,” with its halting introduction, piano, its paradoxically light and heavy texture, and its mysterious echo of Bach’s “Crucifixus” movement of his B-Minor Mass.
The Bach Society welcomes four soloists, soprano Molly Netter, mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski, tenor Gene Stenger and bass Paul Max Tipton. Dr. A. Dennis Sparger, of course, conducts. A fitting memorial for one of Saint Louis’ most beloved musicians, lost too soon to eternity. For more information on the Mozart Requiem and other Bach Society concerts, visit their web site.